Tana S. Ford

When you think of the “college experience,” how do you imagine getting to class every day?

If you were like me in high school, you imagined living in a dorm room, decorated to the nines with the coolest stuff, with a roommate you (secretly) hated. I imagined that I’d wake up every morning and stroll out my front door onto campus, without the need for a car or even a bike.

Needless to say, that’s not how my college experience has gone. Ask my car about it.

Of UT Arlington’s nearly 51,000 students, less than 20% live on campus or within 5 miles of campus. That really doesn’t fit with how most people imagine college, especially a Tier One university.

So how do we fix this?

To be honest, I’m really not sure. Maybe build more affordable on-campus housing? Make it easier for students to live closer to campus? The fact that UT Arlington in in the middle of the DFW metroplex doesn’t make it easy.

Until we can shake that title of “commuter school,” however, I don’t think UTA will be considered a real Tier One school.

I know, typical entitled Millennial. Voting for the Socialist who wants to make college free and tax the ever-loving daylights out of the ultra-rich. I’m such a statistic.

Despite the stereotype of us “selfish, entitled young folk” wanting everything on a silver platter, my affinity for Bernie Sanders is the result of quite the opposite. No, I don’t want tax breaks and I can scrounge up a living working for less than $15 per hour. I have enough opportunities and my family is stable enough for me to make my way, for which I’m eternally grateful.

However, not everyone has the same opportunities that I’ve had.

Sanders has been pushing to assist those with fewer opportunities since he started his career back in the ’70s. He recently identified an old photo of himself being arrested during a protest in South Side Chicago. Since he was a student at the University of Chicago, he was in favor of equality for all and supporting the civil rights movement.

Sanders has also advocated to make health care public, something that will drastically improve American lives by starting at our very basic needs, our physical health.

Perhaps his most well-known push is that for affordable secondary education. This revolutionary (or not-so-revolutionary, as compared to most of the major industrialized countries in the world) proposal would make college accessible for millions of more Americans and even cut already-existing debt by allowing people to refinance their loans.

This proposal has been met with a huge backlash of criticism at the cost. Even without looking at the cost of each part of his proposal, anyone could tell you that the program will be expensive.

But the best part of Sanders’ plan?  Of all his proposals?

He knows exactly how he’ll pay for them.

He may seem like a bit of a quack (that’s how my parents describe him, anyway), but Sanders has a solid, well-paved plan for this country.

In the words of our beloved Smash Mouth, “We could all use a little change.”

Politics are messy.

They always have been, and I’d venture a guess to say they always will be.

So long as we have people who are different, whose opinions differ even slightly, politics will be rough, messy and sometimes a little silly.

That being said, I feel like the nature of politics is no excuse for the circus we have this election year. The GOP seems to be narrowing the gap in a bullshit contest with the collective stock shows of the United States. From the Democrats, “Desperate-to-look-hip Aunt” Hillary and “Crazy Uncle” Bernie leave me feeling like I’ve just watched a sitcom rather than a debate designed to test and inform about the possible future leader of our country.

How did we get to this spectacle? Quirky candidates with policies which challenge the status quo would be refreshing. But this? “Quirky” would be putting it extremely mildly.

My guess at how we arrived at this Ringling Brothers-esque place is through lack of voter education. People are entertained by the shock and awe of some of the candidates, they laugh at the mud-slinging and, quite frankly, the bullying of other candidates (like poor Jeb Bush, who tried to draw attention to Donald Trump’s “insult his way to the presidency” tactics).

So my solution is this: Please, voters. Please, for the love of whichever deity you choose, PLEASE educate yourselves. Do research on the actual policies, qualifications and history of the candidates. The worst thing you can do is vote for someone based on the headlines or the “entertaining” disagreements they get into with other candidates.

…and the void winks back.

The fear of the unknown is an evolved trait in humans. When we were still being hunted by much larger, more deadly apex predators, this was a great advantage. The dark night was dangerous for the things we could not see: the unknowns.

However, in the modern world we do not face these dangers regularly and certainly do not react to familiar dangers the same way. Some of the most dangerous choices we can make are ones that we choose regularly: driving too fast in our cars on the highway or smoking cigarettes.

Yet we still feel anxiety over the things we don’t know. Or at least, most of us do.

I was never born with this fear of the unknown. Ever since I was a child, I’ve run head-first into unfamiliar places and situations, sometimes to the chagrin of my parents. No matter how many safety courses I took at school, I never quite learned the “stranger danger” bit; you could always find me talking to new people and learning about their lives.

From that lack of fear grew my philosophy of life: embrace the unknown, try new things and always be open to people different from you.

With our world growing smaller and smaller each day, we would do well to become more enthusiastic about cultures and experiences different from our own. As a high school student I was given the chance to travel to Taiwan (with no knowledge of Mandarin or of Taiwanese culture) and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I learned so much from their culture, had so many experiences… Those kinds of things helped me to grow as a person.

So when you face the unknown, that dark writhing void of unfamiliarity, don’t be afraid. The void is a sweet person once you get to know it. Embrace the unknown; maybe the void will start to wink back.